Living to Learn Book Launch

Join us on Thursday, March 26 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good (Inventory Press & Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2026).

Editor Noah Simblist will host a conversion with contributors Manuela Moscoso, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Sally Tallant, considering the distinct yet overlapping ways in which education weaves through artist practices, museums, biennials, and universities.

How can alternative organizations and traditional institutions learn from one another? How have exhibition platforms created space for artists to generate learning environments? How have these practices changed assumptions about art institutions and artistic production? How can we think about the economic, ecological, and institutional sustainability of all of these practices?

Living to Learn, edited by Noah Simblist of Virginia Commonwealth University, presents the work of over seventy artists, curators, collectives, and scholars who address contemporary art as a site of learning in the twenty-first century. Building on earlier histories of education as civic service for the common good, it focuses on the last twenty-five years while exploring the future of art education as a practice unfolding both in and beyond school. The book’s case studies reveal how innovations in education have a dynamic relationship with artistic practice, alternative arts organizations, universities, museums, and biennials.

Manuela Moscoso is CARA’s Executive and Artistic Director.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and a death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان) evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward. Accordingly, she explores the politics and poetics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language. A "language person" (Paul Soulellis), she "gives language a body" (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multichannel video works, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms. She has received awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022), and has had exhibitions worldwide. Rasheed is a full-time critic at Yale University’s School of Art and the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts. Through KJR Studios, she founded The Little Octopus School and Orange Tangent Study, initiatives centered on collaborative learning and institutional experimentation.

As a curator, writer and educator, Noah Simblist works on the ways in which contemporary artists address history, sovereignty, and the tensions between political forces and self-determination.  He edited Living to Learn: Art + Education for the Common Good, co-published by Inventory Press and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), supported by the Teiger Foundation; Tania Bruguera: The Francis Effect (Deep Vellum, 2022); and Artist in Residence (Publication Studio, 2021). Curatorial projects include Commonwealth at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (2020); Conjunctions and Disjunctions at Black Ground in Cali, Colombia (2022); and Aissa Deebi: Exile is Hard Work at Birzeit University Museum in Palestine (2017). He is currently working on Cracks in the Edifice: Niemeyer’s Futuristic Fairground in Tripoli, co-organized with Suzy Halajian, supported by the Graham Foundation. He is an associate professor of art at VCU.

Sally Tallant is an internationally recognized curator and leader with over 20 years of experience in major arts institutions. Currently the President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum, where she is leading a $65 million capital campaign, she will transition to her new role as Director of the Hayward Gallery and Visual Arts in July 2026. Her career includes transformative leadership roles as Artistic Director of the Liverpool Biennial and Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery. Awarded an OBE in 2018, Tallant is celebrated for her commitment to civic engagement, ambitious public commissions, and large-scale organizational transformation.